Exploring the Predictive Factors and Sources in English Reading Anxiety from Individual Differences, Grammar Perspectives and Vocabulary Perspectives for Chinese Undergraduates
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Keywords
English reading anxiety, individual differences, grammar, vocabulary
Abstract
Anxiety is a negative emotion that may influence reading performance. The purpose of this study was to investigate the predictive effects of individual differences on Chinese undergraduate students' English reading anxiety and differences in grammar and vocabulary. The predictive effects of gender, major category, grade level, and current level of English proficiency were explored at the individual level. Word comprehension anxiety, word pronunciation anxiety and grammar anxiety are three sources of English reading anxiety. A total of 247 questionnaires were collected in this study, of which 207 were valid. A quantitative methodology was used in this research to handle the data. A multiple linear regression model was used to investigate these predictive factors, and it was found that gender, major category, and grade had no significant effect on Chinese college students' English reading anxiety, whereas the current level of English proficiency had a significant and uneven effect on English reading anxiety. For anxiety resources, Pearson correlation was used to explore the relationships between total reading anxiety scores and word comprehension anxiety, word pronunciation anxiety, and grammar anxiety to identify their ranks. The results of the study revealed that word comprehension anxiety was the most dominant of the three sources of anxiety, followed by grammar anxiety and word pronunciation anxiety. This study also discusses the reasons for these findings and provides pedagogical suggestions for teachers on how to tailor their teaching to the needs of their students, choose appropriate textbooks, and balance the weighting of grammar and vocabulary in English reading, which has a positive effect on the field of foreign language emotion research.
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